Vietnam edges toward freedom
By David Lamb Posted Fri, Dec 1 2000
On Sept. 14, 1945, a young technician tapped out a bulletin announcing to the Vietnamese people that Ho Chi Minh had declared their country’s independence. Thus was born a news agency that would grow into one of Southeast Asia’s largest with 800 editorial staff members and bureaus in all 61 provinces and 23 foreign countries.
Today, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) still speaks the good-news language of government. Like Vietnam itself in this era of growing openness, the press is in transition, caught between the obligation as tools of the Communist Party and a desire to serve up more than a daily diet of official fluff.
‘‘Many people think the Vietnam press just speaks for the government,’’ says Ho Tien Nghi, general director of VNA and a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. ‘‘But I think the role of the press is bigger and more important than that. We’re no longer a weapon to disseminate official policy; we’re a people’s forum. We criticize mistakes of the government. We speak out on corruption and bad manners.’’
Free-press advocates might consider Nghi’s remarks prematurely optimistic. This is a country that centralized media control in 1999 within the Ministry of Culture and Information. It also licenses journalists and media outlets and can revoke those licenses for any reason.
It is a country where Communist Party General Secretary Le Ka Phieu sums up the regime’s attitude with the Orwellian observation: ‘‘Our people won’t allow any political power-sharing with any other forces. Any ideas to promote ‘absolute democracy,’ to put human rights above sovereignty or support multiparty or political pluralism are lies and cheating.’’
When Vietnam edged cautiously into a free-market economy in 1989, it never acknowledged any relationship between the free flow of information and the development of economic reforms. The fact is much has changed in Vietnam’s media in the past decade. Most of it has been for the better.
‘‘There is no question we have more freedom today,’’ says Nguyen Duc Tuan, an editor at Lao Dong (Labor). ‘‘In the old days, we basically had no news. Now reporters like to see how far they can push to get stories printed.’’
Despite widespread self-censorship, Vietnamese journalists routinely report these days on slumping foreign investment, urban power blackouts, drug use among teenagers, rampant corruption as well as smuggling, prostitution and the need for speedier economic reforms.
Granted, these are unofficially sanctioned for discussion by the Hanoi government because party officials have raised them. But such candor would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Even though the party’s Commission of Culture decides what topics will be highlighted in the press in the days ahead, Vietnam’s 77 million people are receiving more news on more subjects with less censorship than ever before.
Newspaper layouts also have gotten brighter and editors, most of whom are party members, have become responsible for the content. Government subsidies have been cut, which forces business managers to accept advertising and to start harping about the need to turn a profit. In addition, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of newspapers and magazines published in Vietnam, from a handful in the early ’80s to nearly 500 today.
It’s just as significant that journalism is not a high-risk profession in Vietnam. Unlike in many developing countries, reporters here don’t disappear in the night or get gunned down in the streets. Some editors have run afoul of authorities — one was fired in 1997 for pursuing an investigation into corruption in the customs department with too much enthusiasm. Generally, being a reporter in Vietnam, where the starting salary is about US$40 a month, is no riskier than being a cyclo driver or a schoolteacher.
Though coverage has gotten freer and a bit bolder, Western readers would not confuse Hanoi Moi (New Hanoi) with the Times of London. Nor would they confuse it with the drab, crude Communist propaganda sheets that characterized the Vietnamese media in the 1970s.
If journalism is an evolutionary process in a developing nation, then Vietnam’s reportage is moving away from the mind-set that there is no news but good news, and that good news is what fuels patriotic zeal.
Most reporters believe an important part of their job entails propaganda, a word that does not have a negative connotation in Vietnam.
‘‘I think we have all the freedom we need now,’’ says Nguyen Khuyen, former editor of the English-language Vietnam News. This statement reflects a widely held belief that economic and social advancement is, for the present at least, more important than democratic growth. ‘‘Besides, no one has total freedom in the press,” Nguyen continues. “Were American reporters allowed complete freedom in the Gulf War?’’